


A Thousand Silent Eyes

by WhyNotFly



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ace subtype: sex repulsed but thinks he deserves it, Anal Probing, Bondage, Dubious Consent, M/M, No Lube, Voyeurism, elias doesn't appear but he is referenced, jon x eye cameras, post 188 coda, tentacle adjacent porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:14:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27753655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: Jon can hear the tape click off, but the cameras surrounding him remain.  He can almost feel their eagerness in the dull, impersonal shine of their lenses, always tightening in or focusing out, desperate to get the perfect view of him.  The air is alive with the quiet whirr of a thousand mechanical eyes, and Jon at their center.  Like a nuclear bomb at a blast site.  Like a heart.“What?”  Jon says, letting the word drip off his tongue like oil.  “Was my story not interesting enough for you?  Or are you just empty little things, who watch and watch and will never be sated?”Jon lifts an eyebrow in challenge.  “Or are you, perhaps, waiting for something specific?”
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 4
Kudos: 53





	A Thousand Silent Eyes

Jon can hear the tape click off, but the cameras surrounding him remain. He can almost feel their eagerness in the dull, impersonal shine of their lenses, always tightening in or focusing out, desperate to get the perfect view of him. The air is alive with the quiet whirr of a thousand mechanical eyes, and Jon at their center. Like a nuclear bomb at a blast site. Like a heart.

“What?” Jon says, letting the word drip off his tongue like oil. “Was my story not interesting enough for you? Or are you just empty little things, who watch and watch and will never be sated?”

The cameras do not reply. The nearest one to Jon’s head, a sleek thing, with a slim, silver cylinder for a body and a broad glass bubble for a lens, lets out a click as it glides around from the side of him to his front. He stares into its empty black depth and, through the glass, he can see the aperture spin out and then tighten back in, an answering echo to Jon’s own pupils reflected back at him.

Jon lifts an eyebrow in challenge. “Or are you, perhaps, waiting for something specific?” 

Something sputters to life behind him, a familiar _tick tick tick_ of magnetic tape winding out along a spool. Jon turns around and finds himself face to face with an old camera, its paint chipped and worn thin as if it had been used for many years. The handle on the side turns hypnotically slowly, as if by a phantom hand, and the rolls of film along the top follow suit. Jon feels eyes behind it, peering through the viewfinder, zooming in on him. This is not surveillance, this is center stage. This is a show, and the Archivist is its star.

“I know what you’re doing,” Jon hisses, letting the power rise like anger, like heat through him. He does not know who is more powerful here, in this place. But he has a feeling he is soon to find out.

“This is the same thing you’ve always done.” Jon takes a step towards the camera, and then another, not taking his gaze off of its glossy black eye. “Watched me. Left me here in the muck and the fear and the pain while you just _watch_ from your high tower, letting me do all your dirty work for you.”

The film goes _click click click_ as it winds its way around, tracing out Jon’s every movement in a thousand perfect imprints. The lens watches as he strides up, it watches as he grabs the film reel in his hand, and it watches as he grits his teeth and tears it off, tossing the film to the ground and letting the black tape scatter against the pavement like blood. 

“Well now I’m _done_ ,” Jon says. “You don’t get to have me anymore.”

The old film camera says nothing, does nothing, sits dormant and empty of film. Dead behind the lens.

Jon tosses his head and turns away. Martin is waiting for him.

As he tries to move, Jon finds his feet somehow restrained, pulling uselessly against some kind of binding. Even here, in the Beholding’s place of power, in this world he walks through like a cloud, unimpeded, even now he feels the puppet strings closing tight around his throat. Piano wire around his wrists. He knows how it feels to be bound.

“No,” Jon says, breathlessly, looking down to see the shiny tangle of magnetic tape pouring from the cracked and broken film casing and slithering across the ground. Somehow animated, wrapping around his ankles and spiraling upwards until he is encased up to his knees. He reaches down to grab at it, to tear it away from his skin, but before he can reach it, some kind of wire wraps around his arm and pulls it back. It is thick, and metal, inset with grooves like the thick cord of a payphone. It winds around and around his arm from wrist to elbow until he can’t even bend his arm let alone move it.

Jon turns to glare at the cord’s owner and is met with the blank, faceless lens of yet another security camera. This one square and blocky and extending from the same utilitarian hole in the wall as the metal cord currently dragging Jon’s arm up above his head until he fears he will be ripped down the middle.

“You can’t keep me here!” He yells, uselessly. The only sign his words have been heard is the relentless whirr of each camera’s lens focusing, adjusting, focusing again. He might as well be meat on the slab. “I can _make you_ stop.”

The street around him falls suddenly, utterly silent. Every camera freezes, the tape still inexorably crawling up his legs goes rigid and inflexible, the cord around his arm stops tugging. Jon wonders, for a moment, what they are waiting for. Is this an admission that he does control them, or proof that they are as unsure about its veracity as he is? Or perhaps this is the last moment they will give him to demonstrate that he is still human enough to be properly horrified. To put the lie to the excitement he feels curling in his stomach at the promise of a new experience, of coming face to face with that which watches the world through him. Maybe he really has been in control all along.

Jon’s eyes flick forward and meet the empty gaze of a small round camera, hanging upside down like a raindrop off the overhang of a roof nearby. There is intention there, somehow, dangling like static in the air around them. Behind the cameras, and in front.

“Elias,” Jon says, letting the name shiver through him, and before he can say anything else, a cord whips out from a nearby camera and wraps once around his throat. He opens his mouth to gasp for air, and the cord slips inside.

Jon’s jaw is forced open wide around the odd device, and his tongue spasms instinctively, pushing at the sharp edges, trying to get the thing _out_. It tastes like blood, metal and cold glass, and his tongue slips too quickly over the slick surface. The smooth end coils possessively into Jon’s mouth, dipping behind his teeth and beneath his tongue like it is cataloguing the inside of him. It hovers at the entrance to his throat and Jon can feel more than hear the vibrating hum of a lens opening and closing. Another camera. Trying to get the perfect angle.

Jon tugs uselessly at the wire around his arm, at the magnetic tape tightening around his legs until his toes start to tingle. The cameras around him are suddenly whirring with activity, leaning in closer and closer until he can feel Elias’s eyes on him from every angle--watching the stretch of his lips around the thick camera pressing inside him, the twitch of his bloodless fingers, the drool dripping down his chin. He narrows his eyes at the closest one, hoping Elias gets the message. The lens flickers, and Jon can almost taste Elias’s hungry leering behind it. But all he’s tasting now is stainless steel and spit and blood. 

Jon’s body convulses instinctively as something cold dips its way beneath his waistband, snaking eagerly around his hips once before dipping lower. The other cameras follow its lead, slipping in through his shirt sleeves and under the hems of his trousers, spreading across his skin like a living web. Everywhere they reach, Jon can feel them stop and turn their mechanized heads, cataloguing each stretch of flesh, each scar. A cool, glass lens presses flat into Jon’s nipple and he shivers.

 _Is this really necessary?_ Jon thinks as hard as he can, glaring into Elias’s black, staring eye as he chokes around the camera forcing its viewfinder down his throat. _What of this haven’t you seen?_

As if in response, the adventurous wire that had slipped down Jon’s trousers begins pushing at the elastic of his boxers, nudging them far enough askew that it can slip inside and brush against Jon’s soft cock. At the same time, another slips up from behind and presses its rounded head against his cheeks. Jon recoils from the freezing cold metal, trying futilely to put some distance between himself and the cameras that are everywhere, squeezing, pressing, _seeing_.

The camera stuffed down his throat finally rips itself back out, and Jon is brought to tears as he coughs and hacks, trying to force air back in and the taste of iron out. His lips tingle painfully from being overstretched and for a moment, he can almost see himself as Elias sees him, through each of a thousand angles. Dangling and debauched, spit dripping down his chin, lips swollen and shiny. Panting for air.

“Elias, please, please,” Jon whispers as he feels his cock begin to fill from the incessant pulsing of the cord wrapped just a little too tight around him. His eyes go blurry with tears until the bank of cameras he is staring into fuzz together into a mass of black and silver. He doesn’t even know if anyone is listening. “Please,” he says again, as the thin wire slips easily inside him.

A voice in Jon’s head that sounds upsettingly like Martin wonders why, after all this time, it is Elias he is asking for mercy. Why he is not taking his rightful place as the Beholding’s chosen one, _making_ the cameras stop the way he certainly could be. Why he is crying again, when he should be finally strong enough to never be hurt.

To his left, there is a click. Straining from the corner of his eyes, Jon can see a single tape recorder sitting on the ground, whirring away in silent observation. This has always been where he belongs. Observed. Seen. Witnessed. Maybe he wouldn’t know who to be if he wasn’t Elias’s.

Jon glances back ahead and there is the camera lens, black and empty and waiting. “When I find you,” Jon says, his voice strained and scratchy from the ache in his throat, “all this will end.”

The camera says nothing, and Jon stares resolutely into it as the tape shifts around his ankles, drawing them further apart so that more wires can stuff themselves inside him, the metal cord around his cock stroking him painfully tight with no lubrication. Jon watches until the pain and pleasure become too much and he has to close his eyes, let his head drop as he moans and twitches and chases his orgasm. When it comes--Jon crying out and pulling helplessly against his restraints--it is seen and recorded from a thousand different angles, by a thousand silent eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! This is for my lovely friend Artemis as a rejected birthday fic, or maybe the legit birthday fic if he ends up liking this one better than the one I give him on the actual day <3 I adore you, you tentacle loving weirdo.
> 
> If you liked this, come chat with my on my tumblr [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/), I post lots of different kinds of writing!! Love you all!


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